In an ambitious treatise on the estimated wealth of the British Empire
in the year of
Waterloo, Patrick Colquhoun added to his calculations of the revenues produced
by
overseas property the potential profits created through exploiting natural
resources. In his
‘political arithmetic’, Colquhoun recognized that an
increasingly lucrative resource could
be found in ‘mines and minerals’, where ‘various
articles extracted from the bowels of the
earth, which the new discoveries in chemistry have rendered valuable articles
of commerce,
have tended greatly to increase the value of the mines’. Such information,
accumulated
through travel, skilled techniques of identification and analysis, and
collecting, proved
central to regulating judgements about potential overseas investment by
the government.

Practices in natural history intersected with the development of British
commerce in a
number of ways. Mineralogists specially trained to identify rare species
of minerals scoured
distant shores and collected sack-loads of specimens, seeking information
about natural
resources that might nourish a developing imperial economy. One such British
mineralogist
was John Mawe, who in 1804 received patronage from Portugal's Prince
Regent to embark
on ‘a voyage of commercial experiment’ to the Portuguese
territory of Brazil and assess the
value of the gold and diamond industries that might revitalize their ailing
and isolated
economy. National and individual economic interests were informed and served
by the
multiplication of such acts of commercial speculation, which focused on
various kinds of
natural resources. Mawe was very conscious that the mineral kingdom held
much to be
explored. Unlike botany, with Linnaean taxonomy rendering order to the
kingdom,
knowledge in mineralogy was far from comprehensive. Mawe lamented that
‘few have
thought the knowledge of Minerals worthy of their attention, although to
them we owe our
national strength and riches’. Others also argued that because it
addressed national
interests, research and education in the earth sciences should be publicly
patronized.